CD-ROM drives still hold their position in the market, although some of us
may think that the CD-RW drives have pushed them aside. The need of reliability
and fast data reading exists and three manufacturers offered their CD-ROM drive
proposals for testing. The drives come from Cyberdrive, Mitsumi and Samsung,
and support 52x maximum reading speed and 54X for the Mitsumi drive.

The "Samsung" and "52x" logos are found in the front of
the Samsung drive. The eject button is next to the led and they both light during
operation. On the left there are the headphone jack and the volume selector.

Installation

CyberDrive
52x was identified as "ATAPI CDROM.52X" . Nero Info tool v1.01 states
that the drive supports only 4x read speed, which is definitely wrong as the
maximum read speed is 52x. The firmware version installed was v130K, and the
buffer size of the drive is 128K. The read features supported are CD-R, CD-RW,
Video CD, CD-Text, CD-G.

Windows
identified the Mitsumi drive as "Mitsumi FX5401W1A". The maximum read speed is 54X and the firmware version installed is v.U01F. The drive supports
CD-R/RW/Video-CD read features and CD-text. Ultra DMA and multisession discs are also included in the features.

Samsung
"SC-152L" v.C100 offers a 52X maximum read speed, has a 128KB cache
buffer and reads fro, CD-R/RW/Video-CD. Nero Infotool reports that the drive
does not support CD-text, however, our tests showed the opposite.